I think it's tactical. Cisco has the lawyers and the intimate knowledge of their products to successfully show that either a) the products don't infringe or b) the patent is invalid due to prior art and such. For TR Labs, suing Cisco is a big risk. But the customers don't have intimate knowledge of Cisco's hardware and firmware. They're not in a position to turn up prior art, nor to show that the hardware doesn't work the way TR Labs says it does. Plus for the customers settling simply means an extra cost, another check to write, whereas for Cisco it'd damage their entire business. So the customers are more apt to settle while Cisco may see it as something they have to fight. That all makes the customers less risky to sue.
Either get one of the customers to ask that Cisco be joined as a co-defendant on the grounds that they're the manufacturer of the equipment, or have one of them move to dismiss the case on the grounds that the defendant sued does not manufacture the equipment, they merely use it as intended by the manufacturer, and that any claims by the plaintiff are invalid due to patent exhaustion. Better yet, have all the defendants do this, forcing TR Labs to face Cisco's attorneys in multiple venues and potentially multiple awards of costs and fees.
About 150 billion emails get sent every day. Assuming they are all collected by NSA and associated agencies I wonder how many emails actually get read each day by NSA analysts.
That's the problem: they don't read them in real-time. They data-mine the entire stream looking for triggers. When they find something that triggers interest, they back up and read everything the people involved have written. So it's not the odds of winning the lottery, it's the odds of winning the lottery if you wait until after the draw (when you know what numbers came up) to go back and submit your ticket. The odds aren't so long then, are they?
Mostly the local papers would need to stop concentrating on reprinting the wire-service stories that readers can get from any of a hundred sources.
For instance, the sexual-harassment accusations allegations against San Diego's mayor. You want to sell papers in San Diego, I'm sure there's plenty of dirt there on both sides. Filner himself strikes me as a used-car salesman, but a significant chunk of the support on the other side comes from his political opponents. And the real dirt's likely to turn up not from looking at lobbyists and campaign donations, but from finding out who they hang out with and what those people have to say about them. That's the kind of stuff the local reporters would be ideal for, something the wire services can't offer. Yet the local papers are content to reprint the same generic AP wire stories. And they wonder why nobody reads them.
"And I'd like to see you go to the funeral and explain to the family why their son or husband or father is not coming home that night."
Mr. Bloomberg, a police officer's job, along with that of fireman and many other public safety professions, is quite simply to go into the kinds of situations that can result in you not coming home, and moreover to go into them with the express intent of putting the lives of others ahead of your own. Anyone in those professions whose family has difficulty with this needs to have a long serious discussion about the topic with their family. Any police officer who has difficulty with this concept needs to seriously reconsider their chosen profession.
There's situations at work where I'm required to answer my boss's questions with the equivalent of "That's classified.". I work with credit data. That means at times I'm working with the actual credit data files of real people to troubleshoot issues. My boss doesn't have to troubleshoot it, so he's not permitted to see that data. If he asks for it, I can be fired if I give it to him or tell him details from it.
Developers: switch from fast, efficient-to-calculate hashes (eg. MD5, SHA1, etc.) to something like BCrypt that's designed to be inefficient to calculate. That scotches a lot of off-line attacks because they can't try hundreds of millions of possibilities a second anymore.
Users: don't share passwords between sites. And don't use methods based on slight variations on a single base password. Use a password storage program that lets you generate highly-random passwords per-account. That won't protect you from this, but it'll mean that disclosure of your password by one site won't compromise any other sites.
Not necessarily. If a defense is sufficiently general, it may not matter how many plaintiffs there are or how they're grouped. Take a set of plaintiffs claiming that my company was responsible for the food poisoning they got from bad cold cuts and they want it certified for class action. My defense is "My company doesn't make cold cuts of any sort, we don't distribute them, and our shipments never have any in them.". If that defense is valid, then there's no need to litigate either as a class or individually.
Ah, but suppose the defendant has the police personal-property paperwork that's filled out on everyone taken into custody listing all the stuff they collected from him, and it shows he did have his cel phone on him and it was placed in storage by them along with everything else in his pockets. That pretty much nails it down, they can't allege he didn't have it on him without claiming in court that they falsified their own records.
One crucial difference: the brick-and-mortar store pays sales tax based on it's address, not the customer's. They know where their store is, and they only have to worry about one single sales tax rate. If the customer lives where the sales tax rate is different, or lives in another state, the store doesn't have to worry about that. Technically the customer owes the sales tax to the city, county and state where he lives, not where he bought the goods, but the responsibility there is on the customer and not the merchant.
Compare this to the on-line sales tax proposals, where the burden of figuring out what tax is owed to who is placed on the merchant instead of the customer.
How about instead of opposing this, we turn it around and push to make brick-and-mortar merchants collect sales tax based on where the buyer lives just like on-line merchants would? In many cases, if the big retailers argued you could present them with their own statements on the record where they said this system was acceptable... Fair's fair, if they want this complication then let everybody live with it.
On the post: Court Says Cisco Has No Right To Sue To Invalidate A Patent That Is Being Used Against Its Customers
Re: Re:
On the post: Court Says Cisco Has No Right To Sue To Invalidate A Patent That Is Being Used Against Its Customers
On the post: Why NSA Boss Believes His Agency Is All Good: Intentions vs. Actions
http://railean.net/index.php/2008/04/14/how_shit_happens_1
although that's not the original source for the story. Cf. the game of "Telephone".
On the post: More NSA Spying Fallout: Groklaw Shutting Down
Re: Needles in Haystacks
That's the problem: they don't read them in real-time. They data-mine the entire stream looking for triggers. When they find something that triggers interest, they back up and read everything the people involved have written. So it's not the odds of winning the lottery, it's the odds of winning the lottery if you wait until after the draw (when you know what numbers came up) to go back and submit your ticket. The odds aren't so long then, are they?
On the post: Yet Another Newspaper Paywall Goes Bust: SF Chronicle Gives Up After Just Four Months
Re:
For instance, the sexual-harassment accusations allegations against San Diego's mayor. You want to sell papers in San Diego, I'm sure there's plenty of dirt there on both sides. Filner himself strikes me as a used-car salesman, but a significant chunk of the support on the other side comes from his political opponents. And the real dirt's likely to turn up not from looking at lobbyists and campaign donations, but from finding out who they hang out with and what those people have to say about them. That's the kind of stuff the local reporters would be ideal for, something the wire services can't offer. Yet the local papers are content to reprint the same generic AP wire stories. And they wonder why nobody reads them.
On the post: Annoyed NY Mayor Attacks Court Decision On Stop And Frisk With Condescension And Hyperbole
Mr. Bloomberg, a police officer's job, along with that of fireman and many other public safety professions, is quite simply to go into the kinds of situations that can result in you not coming home, and moreover to go into them with the express intent of putting the lives of others ahead of your own. Anyone in those professions whose family has difficulty with this needs to have a long serious discussion about the topic with their family. Any police officer who has difficulty with this concept needs to seriously reconsider their chosen profession.
On the post: Congress Abuses 'It's Classified' To Hide Stuff They Don't Want To Talk About
On the post: Feds Now Demanding Internet Companies Hand Over User Passwords Too
Users: don't share passwords between sites. And don't use methods based on slight variations on a single base password. Use a password storage program that lets you generate highly-random passwords per-account. That won't protect you from this, but it'll mean that disclosure of your password by one site won't compromise any other sites.
On the post: Appeals Court Hints VERY Strongly That Google Books Is Fair Use, Even Though It Wasn't Asked About That
Re: Re: Re:
On the post: Feds May Have To Reveal FISA Phone Records In Murder Case
Re: Devils Advocate
On the post: Senator Wyden Takes A Stand Against Overbroad Tax On Internet Transactions
Re:
Compare this to the on-line sales tax proposals, where the burden of figuring out what tax is owed to who is placed on the merchant instead of the customer.
On the post: Senator Wyden Takes A Stand Against Overbroad Tax On Internet Transactions
Turn it around
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